Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 368 pp. Zack Reat
aegis 2006 106 reat
Samuel Huntington’s article entitled “The Clash of Civilizations?” was published in Foreign Affairs journal in the summer of 1993. In that article he proposed a theory on the future organization of world politics in the post-Cold War period. In brief, his thesis was that the the primary source of conflict in the world would be cultural, not economic or ideological.1 Furthermore, the dividing lines of conflict would be along borders between nations that exist on civil boundaries. This theory for post-Cold War development ran directly counter to the more optimistic “‘end of history’ thesis advanced by Francis Fukuyama,” and thus, created a great deal of controversy in the field.2 The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is Huntington’s response to the questions and critiques raised by the original article. In this book Huntington argues that the civilizations of the world will not naturally congregate behind one system of government and get along in relative peace and harmony in the post-Cold War world. Instead, civilizations will come into conflict over matters that are not economic or ideological, but cultural. Huntington’s thesis rests on the assertion that “culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world.”3 Throughout the five sections of the book Huntington expands on this main thesis and comes to many conclusions about the future of civilizations and their part in global politics. The first section presents Huntington’s argument on the organization of civilizations on the global scale. The seven main civilizations presented in the first part of the book are as follows: Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Western, Latin America, and African. It is in this section that the make-up and relationships between these civilizations are revealed and discussed in the context of a universal civilization in the wake of modernization and Westernization. Section 2 addresses “The Shifting Balance of Civilizations”4 by beginning with an explanation of the West’s decline in power on the global scale. Huntington offers a quantitative analysis of Western civilization’s power in comparison with the world’s other civilizations. From the data Huntington provides it is clear that the West is in a state of decline as other civilizations gain more power and influence throughout the world. The most impressive challenges to Western domination come from Islamic and Asian civilizations. According to Huntington these civilizations stand alone in defying the West as their culture is expanding without deference to the standards of Western civilization. In fact, “Both Asians and Muslims stress the superiority of their cultures to Western culture.”5 The next section of the book deals with the grouping of civilizations around the world, and the effects that those groupings have on conflict. Huntington explains that in the post-Cold War world, “Countries relate to civilizations as member states, core, states, lone countries, cleft countries, and torn countries.”6 These countries are classified in such a way
